The Night the Ghost Got In James Grover Thurber 10th - - After a long minute, I slowly opened it again. There was nothing there. There was no sound. None of us ever heard the ghost again.
The slamming of the doors had aroused mother: she peered out of her room. ‘What on earth are you boys doing?’ she demanded. Herman ventured out of his room. ‘Nothing,’ he said, gruffly , but he was, in colour, a light green.
‘What was all that running around downstairs?’ said mother. So she had heard the steps, too! We just looked at her. ‘Burglars!’ she shouted, intuitively .
I tried to quieten her by starting lightly downstairs. ‘Come on, Herman,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay with mother,’ he said. ‘She’s all excited.’ I stepped back onto the landing.
‘Don’t either of you go a step,’ said mother. ‘We’ll call the police.’ Since the phone was downstairs, I didn’t see how we were going to call the police -- nor did I want the police – but mother made one of her quick, incomparable decisions. She flung up a window of her bedroom which faced the bedroom windows of the house of a neighbour, picked up a shoe, and whammed it through a pane of glass across the narrow space that separated the two houses. Glass tinkled into the bedroom occupied by a retired engraver named Bodwell and his wife.
Bodwell had been for some years in rather a bad way and was subject to mild ‘attacks’. Almost everybody we knew or lived near had some kind of attacks. It was now about two o’clock of a moonless night; clouds hung black and low. Bodwell was at the window in a minute, shouting frothing a little, shaking his fist.
‘We’ll sell the house and go back to Peoria,’ we could hear Mrs. Bodwell saying. It was some time before mother ‘got through’ to Bodwell. ‘Burglars!’ she shouted.
‘Burglars in the house!’ Herman and I hadn’t dared to tell her that it was not burglars but ghosts, for she was even more afraid